


Such Balsam Falls

by speakmefair



Category: Chronicles of Chrestomanci - Diana Wynne Jones
Genre: Fever, Hurt/Comfort, Late Night Conversations, Multi, Nightmares, Synesthesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 18:50:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/pseuds/speakmefair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Mordecai tries very hard to find something to hate, is incredibly reckless with his own safety, and finds out it's not always a bad thing to be proved wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Such Balsam Falls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [highfantastical](https://archiveofourown.org/users/highfantastical/gifts).



They don't get on, at first.

Why would they? 

They don't know each other.

And even their introduction is a lie. It has to be. Mordecai's not who he says he is, or what he says he is, and he doesn't intend to forget that, even though he'd like to

(even though he wants to)

so really, the fact that he forgets their first meeting is natural.

(Flavian doesn't. But Mordecai only finds that out a long time later.)

They meet on Mordecai's first day.

Mordecai's only introduced to him (and that from a distance) on the eighth.

"Who's that?" Mordecai, who no longer feels like Tacroy at all (though he remembers all too well what Tacroy does feel like, and wishes sometimes that he couldn't), asks Rosalie, pointing out the man he keeps seeing around the place and can never put a name to

(he should, it's what he's here for, but there's something about Flavian that makes you _want_ to forget him the second you aren't looking right at him, and Mordecai's been busy.)

Besides, Rosalie's warm, in a world of chill and damp. It takes all his focus.

 _Miss_ Rosalie, she insists, but he can't think of her that way, not when she's so very real and alive and nothing like the haziness of all his other worlds.

"Oh," she says, and smiles, a little affectionate and slightly amused — _how can you not know, after you've spent days here?_ he hears in her voice, and bites back a little spurt of annoyance. It's not her fault. "That's Flavian, of course. Flavian Temple."

Mordecai decides in that moment that maybe he's got a focus for dislike, here, after all.

Flavian's hazier than them all, his need to be unnoticed feels to Mordecai as though he's wrapped in cobwebs.

But Rosalie likes him. He can't play cricket, and he'd stay behind wards forever if he was allowed, he'd wrap himself around in books and learning as though they were nothing more than another way to become invisible. He's nothing.

He wouldn't last a second with the Dright.

In a world where everyone is pale, and yet very far from bloodless

(Rosalie's pink cheeks as she comes in from the cold, Gabriel flushing with mild annoyance at everyone's moments of pure idiocy and their terrible gaps in understanding, Argent's choleric red, crossing his nose and forehead, unsightly and hot to the eye, the sudden dazzle-flash of temper that turns blue eyes into the icy, eerie glare of a winter sky)

in a world where his own dark skin is the anomaly, and the blanched looks of others, highlighted by the red of a mouth, a coppery strand of hair catching the sun, the flicker of dark lashes above purple-shadowed eyes; in a world where all these things are the norm, only Flavian remains colourless. 

_Pallid, pallor, faded,_ Mordecai thinks of him. This silent, emotionless man with his stodgy stoicism and his dull acceptance of all the things he'll never be good at. This man who is so quiet, and who watches without comment, and makes himself forgettable.

_Why? Why don't you try? Why don't you fight, flash, flare into reality, like everyone else here?_

_Would it be so terrible, to try and keep trying and to fail?_

But Rosalie likes him.

Just for that, Mordecai decides, he damned well won't.

He refuses to call it envy.

(He certainly refuses to acknowledge that it's not envy of Rosalie's affection. It's envy of a man who can make himself forgotten.)

**

The only thing they really argue about is an approach to magic. Flavian thinks it's to be analysed. Mordecai thinks it's something there to be used as fully as possible.

Mordecai thinks Flavian's a coward.

Flavian thinks Mordecai's reckless.

Just, it turns out, not in the way Mordecai's always assumed.

"No," says Flavian one day, after Mordecai's patiently explained for the thousandth time that intangibility can be achieved in any of the Series, and then, "don't be ridiculous."

Mordecai's opinion of him hasn't changed much. He's never known what Flavian thinks of him, and he doesn't much care, either. But he does know that he's good at things, good at them in a way that Flavian never will be, never wants to try to be, and the casual dismissal stings.

"It'll work," he insists. "You know it will."

"I don't care." Flavian doesn't stand up for things, so this is new. It's not particularly welcome, but it's new. "I don't care if it works. You can't —"

"I _can_." He's not sure if it's Mordecai or Tacroy who's so set on proving this.

"Yes, I know you _can_ ," Flavian says irritably. "That's not the point. You can't without cost to you. Not acceptable. Find something else."

He can't change Flavian's mind. He can't get him to even agree that he has a point. Or maybe that there is a point.

 _Stubborn jackass,_ he thinks, and walks off to be told exactly the same things by Gabriel, and later by a very annoyed Rosalie.

It doesn't improve either his temper or his opinion of Flavian.

It doesn't stop him thinking, though, of Flavian's voice when he said _I don't care._

There had definitely been colour in his tone, even if it never reached his skin.

It will be even longer before Mordecai realises that when Flavian said _I don't care_ , he meant _about the magic._ He meant _except about you._ But then, Mordecai (who is still Tacroy, under it all) has always accepted that it's anger which shows how strongly people feel. Anger and laughter, and sometimes, if they can't help it, tears; rage-born, stinging salt waterdrops that deny the strength of their wellspring with their outward-seeming display of weakness. 

Not dogged, solid stubbornness.

Not Flavian, bloodless, plaster-cast Flavian.

(In retrospect, he misses out on a lot, in those early days.)

**

He sees a book as he passes a shop one day, and is surprised to find that it's Flavian who comes to mind. It's nothing to do with magic, or history, or politics. It's not poetry.

It's a reproduction of someone's diary, someone who in another world might not have been born, or if they were, might never have put pen to paper for more than a bread-and-butter letter. It's thin, and slightly foxed, and the marbled paper at the front is faded.

He's even more surprised when he buys it.

It stays, still wrapped in the seller's brown paper and string, in his drawer for nearly a year.

He can't remember, when he finds it again, and thinks _Oh, I should give him that,_ why he'd thought of Flavian in the first place, or why he had felt that strange brief desire to give him something, bring him something.

He just remembers that he did, and that it had been raining, and people had carried rain on their clothes and hats like randomly, beautifully scattered glass shards, and that the air had smelled like damp stone and woodsmoke.

He can't remember why he changed his mind.

He never gives it, either, in the end. It doesn't remind him of Flavian at all, by the time he opens that particular drawer.

**

Things change because Flavian is all those things that Mordecai once determined to dislike. He is stubborn (he is loyal), he is dull (he is stalwart), he is colourless (he is glass in sunlight), he is boring and quiet and half-hidden from the world (he is utterly reliable, impossible to panic).

He is utterly, completely trustworthy.

He is the one person in the Castle who can be woken in the middle of the night to be informed that something has gone wrong, gone terribly wrong, that there is nothing in the world but cold, a bone-permeating chill that consumes him from the inside out, tortures his leg-muscles into iron with shivers that are more like spasms, convulsions, a personal and private rack for his sinews to twist upon.

Flavian does not say _what have you done_ , he does not hint at some nebulous _I told you so._

He makes tea, and builds up the fire, and finds blankets, and his hands are warm and steady and kind where they brush over Mordecai's chilled skin, checking for fever, checking for a simple answer that has nothing to do with the shocked fear that is eating him alive, but can be solved with human touch and kindness and warmth, warmth, warmth.

How could he ever have thought Flavian forgettable? He is the only thing Mordecai can hold clearly in his mind, that long and miserable night.

"Do you remember —" he keeps saying, but he can't remember the rest of the question.

Flavian only answers "Yes," certain and sure, as though he has always known what the words were going to eventually be, as though he is providing the answer to something else entirely, something concrete and real instead of this dizzy, frantic groping after something nebulous and oh, so needed.

He is warm, and he is real, and he is solid under Mordecai's shaking hands, he is the fine webbing that holds the world barriers steady, and he is warm, and he does not let go, even though he is still, for the most part, silent.

"I was going to hate you."

"Yes."

"I can't."

"Good."

There is sweat on Mordecai's body, coating him, he can feel the drops run down his back, his ribs, his neck, soak his hair, and still he shivers.

And Flavian holds on.

**

Rosalie's blood beats quickly under her skin, her pulse is visible in her throat, as though she were a young girl (the girl she has never really been). She is mocking and sharp and self-aware, and her heat is a flame, not a steady glow.

Mordecai loves her without reservation.

Gabriel tells them both, separately, differently, that they do not know each other yet, and _no,_ Mordecai thinks, _no, no, it's Flavian I don't know_ —

(it's no longer true.)

**

Flavian holds on, he holds fast, and he opens his door at night without question, and he draws away nightmares like a poultice on an infected sore.

He smells like soap and wax and ink, like old paper and sometimes, just a little, like blood, where he's bitten down too far on a cuticle, and torn his skin.

The hollow of his shoulder feels like old rubbed cotton, soft and tough and made for everyday wearing.

His hands are very pale against Mordecai's, his stomach gives slightly when Mordecai presses down on him, he has no hard definition to him, he is pliant and responsive and it is impossible to see how his body works, no roped muscles of poverty and effort standing out.

And always, always, he is warm and he is steady and he never turns away, and he never fails to come to his door on the nights when Mordecai thinks there is nothing in the world but the cold of his spirit and the chilling ague that racks his bones inside the hollowed-out shell he is becoming.

"You don't talk much," Mordecai says one time, the understatement of all time.

"I don't have much to say."

"I want to hear your voice."

"Why?"

"It—" _it smells like woodsmoke,_ he nearly says, nonsensically, for how can a voice have scent? _It smells like woodsmoke and it tastes like rain and it feels like home._ "I don't know. Please."

Flavian reads, or perhaps remembers; he recites poems from all the worlds that have been visited, his firm calm voice half-chants things Mordecai should know.

Flavian does not like spirit walking, and he has never been one to ask more about the worlds than "Did everything go all right?", but he understands the draw of it, the pull of it, the mysteries that are there, wrapped within each Series, and he finds things 

(he remembers things)

to say 

(to read, to quote)

that are as warm as his body, as safe a haven as his arms.

"Heap cassia, sandal-buds and stripes  
Of labdanum, and aloe-balls,  
Smeared with dull nard an Indian wipes  
From out her hair: such balsam falls  
Down sea-side mountain pedestals,  
From tree-tops where tired winds are fain,  
Spent with the vast and howling main,  
To treasure half their island-gain."

**

"Do you remember when we met?"

"Yes," says Flavian, and he smiles. "Of course."

"I don't. I know when we did, but I don't remember it. Do you — forgive me?" Inadequate. Ridiculous. All he has left, by way of words.

Flavian touches his mouth to Mordecai's forehead, lets him feel the gentleness of his words.

"Ask me when there's something to forgive."

 _There is,_ thinks the man who is also Tacroy, who is doubly a traitor, who sometimes forgets who is or what he should do. _There is, and I can't—_

"Mordecai. Listen to me. When there is something — if there should ever be something — promise me you'll come to me then, and ask me."

"What if—"

" _Promise me._ "

"Yes," he whispers, shivering, shuddering, falling apart, because this is the heat of giving trust, and it hurts the frostbitten remnants of his integrity. "Yes, I promise."

"Thank you," Flavian says in relief, and pulls the covers around them both, safe-haven of warmth that hide them both from a world that is becoming less and less endurable. His hands are gentle on Mordecai's back, smoothing light, wide circles, like ripples on a mill-pond, pulling him towards sleep.

"Thank you."

**

After what came terribly close to the end of the world, Flavian still reads.

"And strew faint sweetness from some old  
Egyptian's fine worm-eaten shroud  
Which breaks to dust when once unrolled;  
Or shredded perfume, like a cloud  
From closet long to quiet vowed,  
With mothed and dropping arras hung,  
Mouldering her lute and books among,  
As when a queen, long dead, was young."

"Can you forgive me now?" Mordecai asks, on a day when it seems impossible, on a day when he has been forced into showing them all the truth of the things he has done and the things he has left undone, and Flavian is quieter than ever, but he has still opened his door, and his arms are still warm, and he still says in the voice that feels like home,

"Yes."

The smell of salt water on Mordecai's face is familiar, as is the taste of the shoulder and shirt that are absorbing it.

But this time it is not sweat, but tears.

And he is anything but cold.


End file.
